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World Cup quarterfinalist Costa Rica will face Jamaica in its CONCACAF Gold Cup opener July 8 at StubHub Center in Carson. That Group B game will begin at 5 p.m., to be followed by Canada-El Salvador at 7:30. The defending champion United States, which is in Group A, will play its opener at Toyota Stadium in Dallas on July 7 against the winner of this month’s play-in game between Honduras and French Guiana. Panama will play Haiti in the tournament opener earlier on July 7 in Dallas. Mexico anchors Group C, which will begin play at Soldier Field in Chicago on July 9. Mexico will meet Cuba in the second game there following the opener, in which Trinidad and Tobago faces...

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World Cup quarterfinalist Costa Rica will face Jamaica in its CONCACAF Gold Cup opener July 8 at StubHub Center in Carson. That Group B game will begin at 5 p.m., to be followed by Canada-El Salvador at 7:30.
The defending champion United States, which...

A look at the two World Cup quarterfinal games scheduled for Saturday in Brazil.
ARGENTINA VS. BELGIUM
Where: Brasilia. Time: 9 a.m. PDT.
TV: ABC, Univision.
The buzz: Lionel Messi will make his 91st appearance for the Argentine national team in...

The 2014 World Cup officially gets underway Thursday in Brazil when the host country takes on Croatia at 1 p.m. PDT on ESPN.
But what about the rest of the games? Are you trying to plan your days so you can watch all the matches? Below is the entire...

Luis Suarez is the best soccer player in the world.
That's not opinion, it's science.
Or at least it's the science compiled by Bloomberg, which analyzed players in Europe's top five leagues, measuring everything from defensive and attacking...

Mario Balotelli tweeted that he would welcome a peck on the cheek from Queen Elizabeth II as a reward if his Italy team kept alive England's chances to advance in the World Cup by downing Costa Rica.
Final score: Costa Rica 1, Italy 0. Does this mean the...

The sport known as football almost everywhere beyond our borders bears few similarities to the USA's heavily padded version. Here is one timely likeness: The roll call of ailing players scratched from the tournament is long enough to resemble the NFL...

Costa Rica was supposed to have gone home a long time ago.
Before Brazil, it had qualified for only three World Cups, making it out of the group stage once. It was no better than the third-best qualifier from its own region.
But Saturday the little...

Arjen Robben made a mistake. No, not diving -- a habitual act of folly perpetrated by the fast Netherlands forward -- against Mexico. It was Robben, while casting himself as an honest man, acknowledging afterward that he dove. (Which literally makes...

Viewers with no dog in the fight between the Netherlands and Costa Rica might have asked themselves: Do we pull for the big, bad favorite that ascribes to a delightful brand of soccer or root for the heartwarming Cinderella whose ultra-defensive...

He was a big part of the team's spine, the backbone of a high-energy attack that had Brazil poised to win a record sixth World Cup in next weekend's final.
But now that Neymar's own backbone has been fractured, Brazil's title chances may be broken as...

Goalkeeping is a lonely existence. You stand in front of the goal, often reduced to a spectator, as your 10 teammates zip up and down the field. The blame aimed your way often overwhelms the plaudits. Anyone with a fragile psyche need not apply.
The...

To be sure, the party crashers from Costa Rica who have elbowed and kneed their way into the World Cup's elite eight are like third-party candidates in elections. Their chance of winning it all ranges between slim and none.
But the Ricans' opponents in...

Three weeks ago, Juergen Klinsmann predicted his U.S. team wouldn't win the World Cup. And he was right.
So who is he picking in the final?
"Brazil is the No. 1 name to mention," Klinsmann said Wednesday, "because of their talent [and]...

The weirdness of this World Cup can be summed up in a sentence: Little old Costa Rica, which won the Group of Tradition with three ex-champions (Uruguay, Italy, England), faces a team (Greece) that just won its second Cup game ever.
Fancy meeting them...

KNOCKOUT STAGE
NETHERLANDS VS. MEXICO
Where: Fortaleza. Time: 9 a.m. PDT.
TV: ESPN, Univision.
The buzz: This could be one of the most interesting matchups of this World Cup given that the teams couldn't be more different. The Dutch lead the...

For all his individual brilliance, one of the knocks against Lionel Messi has always been that he's only as good as the players around him.
Surround him with an all-star team like he has at Barcelona and he wins six La Liga titles, three Champions League...

In case there was any doubt, FIFA made it official Thursday: The U.S. is no longer the top soccer country in North and Central America.
In fact, it's not even No. 2.
In the latest world rankings released Thursday, soccer's global governing body ranks...

In 1968, decades before "latte" and "barista" became everyday terms, Herbert Hyman and his wife, Mona, opened a small store in the tony Westside district of Brentwood to sell coffee — not the tasteless grounds of uncertain provenance...

The late author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who died Thursday at age 87, was best known as a Nobel Prize-winning novelist and pioneer of the genre known as magical realism. But the prolific Colombian writer also had ties to the movies.
Marquez's work...